“Ancestral Weight” (“Peso ancestral”), published in Alfonsina Storni’s second poetry collection and sometimes translated as “Ancestral Burden,” provides a historical dimension to the expression of tensions between the genders evident in her early works, even as it belies the claim that her poetry disparages men. This poem shows that strict gender stereotypes define, confine, and victimize both genders, not just women.

Absent is the romantic movement’s individualistic “I” struggling alone in a hostile world. Here, the weight of historical forces has created a patriarchal system that defines proper, limited roles based on gender. Handed down from generation to generation of male descendants is the prohibition against expressing emotions, the entrapment of men who must appear to be “made of steel” (“de acero”) and live a machinelike existence without the option of feeling or expressing pain. Storni is clear that restrictions on one gender can poison relations with the other, since the woman sheds a tear that is part of her heritage too, a “soft” sign that cues her gendered difference from her progenitors and signifies her exclusion from society’s “strong.” It is not just the contemporary form of social conditions that separates the genders and impedes communion between them; the male-female divide is the legacy of centuries.

Yet, the insistent “You said . . . You said . . .” (“Tú me dijiste . . . / Tú me dijiste . . .”) signals that a female breaks her silence, although she speaks only of the “other” (and not of herself) to signal her pain, which is fully expressible only in a tear. Communication between females can eschew the male-dominated (phallologocentric) world of words in favor of the nonverbal, physical, body-linking sharing of a tear, shed by one, absorbed and understood by another. In this expression of the collective concerns of women, a legacy of silent grief, accepted by one as destiny and inheritance, is rejected, however, by the speaker, who can no longer tolerate that historical determinism. By implication, what is historically defined as the human condition is not God-given but, rather, what we today would call a social construction that can be dismantled and reconstructed. The poem, then, actually stands firm in rejecting the historically dualistic definitions and divisions of people and is generally considered to reflect Storni’s comprehension of (but distancing from) her mother’s generation.

In this often anthologized poem, the first two lines are almost identical, a familiar technique in oral and popular literature to engage the listener/reader’s attention. Storni employs a rigid four-line stanza of three unrhyming lines of 12 syllables (abc), followed by a short (five-syllable) fourth line in assonant “b” rhyme (abuelo, acero); likewise, the following two stanzas maintain the same assonant “b” rhyme (an unaccented “oh”: veneno, pequeño; beberlo, peso). This structural element, in contrast to “free verse,” for example, reinforces the poem’s message of conformity to predefined patterns. However, the short fourth line of each stanza, as against more classic quatrains, leaves the reader/listener with a mental sort of dot-dot-dot, or ellipsis, as if to invite questioning.

Bibliography
Storni, Alfonsina. “Peso ancestral”/“Ancestral Burden.” Translated by Andrew Rosing. In Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, edited by Stephen Tapscott, 106–111. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Categories: Gender Studies, Literature

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